Harinarayan Young Neuroscientist Award 2021

UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, London, UK

"Activity-dependent Gene Therapy for Intractable Epilepsy"

Dr Gabriele Lignani is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. The main focus of his lab is finding novel gene therapy approaches for intractable neurological diseases, with rapid potential for translation. His research starts by investigating the pathophysiological mechanisms of disease and then use novel insights to develop and improve therapeutic tools to cure them. His Team uses cutting-edge technologies such as CRISPR and synthetic promoters to overcome current limitations to gene therapy and develop new approaches for curing currently untreatable genetic diseases such as Dravet Syndrome, and acquired drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsies.